Measuring the impact of delays in care in a developing country

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The health and cost impact of delay in receiving health care and the experimental impact of providing improved insurance was studied in the Philippines by Kraft et al, from the University of California San Francisco and the University of the Philippines School of Economics.

The authors studied 4070 young children through a Quality Improvement Demonstration Study, a randomized controlled experiment assessing the effects of increasing insurance coverage. They found that delaying care for more than 2 days was associated with an increased probability of a poorer clinical outcome and a small increase in average hospitalization cost. Insurance intervention resulted in 5 additional children per 100 receiving timely care. This is one of the first studies to rigorously assess the impact of a randomized insurance intervention on a large number of children in a developing country.

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